


Eternal Love

by shulamithbond



Series: Reality X [4]
Category: Popsy - Stephen King, Salem's Lot - Stephen King, The Night Flier - Stephen King, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Abuse, Domestic Violence, F/M, Gen, Interspecies Relationship(s), Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-23
Updated: 2014-10-23
Packaged: 2018-02-22 06:14:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2497553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shulamithbond/pseuds/shulamithbond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes love is not enough.</p><p>(Set a couple decades before the events of "Vampires of Maine," but either can be read on its own.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eternal Love

“Get me the hell out of here, old man!”

        The old man in question visibly paused a moment over the evening paper he was reading, in defiance of the red, fading daylight. Then, he went back to it. He knew he really should read the newspaper more often; it was just that usually mornings- or, really, evenings, if you wanted to get technical- were so busy; then, before he knew it, one of his many nieces, nephews, or grandchildren inevitably needed to cut it up for some class project or other.

        He didn’t mind much, though. The rarity of being able to sit and read the paper- even in such circumstances as these- made it a luxury. Gods knew he needed it; it’d been a hell of a month. First there was that awful business with Barlow and the turning of Jerusalem’s Lot, and then that strange thing they’d dug up in Haven, and finally the creation of a support group for irrational, violent, possibly deathless beings perilously close to the town. Then some creep had nearly kidnapped little Isak at the mall (that kid did wander) when the old man had taken him to go buy the dolls- ‘action figures’ they were called, according to Arianrod- he’d been begging for. That had turned into a nasty scene.

         Yes, considering all that, it truly was a luxury, one of life’s simple pleasures, to be sitting here, with the paper and a can of BB. Even if “here” was an abandoned refrigerator in the junkyard halfway between home and the town, on a muggy summer night with the mosquitos circling and finding their way into the open can. The old man, whose name was (not deservedly) Ranulf McAshton, allowed his extremely old bones to relax a hair.

        It was a bad idea. His prisoner seemed to sense the easing of tension, and took the opportunity to throw himself yet again at the metal lid of his prison. Ranulf held on with his knees as the fridge bucked like one of his old planes in a dogfight; humans got more brittle with age, but he didn’t seem to, luckily. At least, he hadn’t yet.

        “You may as well simmer down in there,” he said, not bothering to speak Wamtrachs; he doubted if a West Coast youngster like this even knew it, or at least more than a few American-accented phrases. “Going to be a long night, otherwise.”

        “You can’t stay here all night, old man! You’re probably going to get… _arthritis_ or something!”

       “Want to bet?” Ranulf settled back. “What you children today don’t understand is that us old ones, we’re used to things happening slower. When I was your age, we thought trains were the fastest people would ever travel. That’s why we hardly ever fly on the airplanes,” he added reflectively. “Except me, of course, and those were great days. You could join the Air Force,” he remarked down at the fridge. “You learn a skill, you get work experience. You hardly ever have to kill people, at least not up close. No blood smell.”

       There was a long silence from the fridge, and then the voice, which seemed to belong to a young man, said, “You care about that? Not killing…people?”

        “Of course. Nothing wrong with most people, especially humans, that I should want to kill them. Too many of you youngsters get raised on that Traditionalist or Neodraculean garbage, that killing some random human brutally and drinking his warm, still-flowing blood makes you a man.” He looked down. “Hurting anyone, even if you need to…or think you do…that doesn’t make you a man, you know. Taking responsibility…protecting the people you care about…that’s what it means to be a man.”

       “I know that!” insisted the younger man, voice echoing metallically. “That’s what I do! It’s what I’ve done ever since I met her! I protected her! Me and my awesome Volvo-“

       “That’s protection, is it? Let me tell you, son, if someone had ‘protected’ one of my daughters the way you _protected_ her, I’d have been out riding the night wind with my shotgun”-

       “Shut up! You don’t understand our love-“

       Ranulf cut him off calmly. “Listen, boy, I know the story. From the beginning.”

       “Then you know our love is _eternal_! Now stop lecturing me and let me out of here!”

       “All love is eternal,” Ranulf remarked conversationally. “Until it’s not. That’s the true gamble of love. We risk the possibility that it won’t be eternal, and we don’t know if we’ve won until a lifetime later, when we find ourselves either with the one we love…or without her.

       “The important thing is, we take the risk. We don’t try to count cards or rig the odds. Above all, if our number stops coming up…we don’t tackle the dealer.”

       There was another _bang_ to the lid. “Enough stupid metaphors and lobster-fisher-hillbilly wisdom, old man! You’re just like the Volturi! Well, you’re not the boss of me! You hear that? _You’re not the boss of me!”_

       Ranulf lapsed into what he hoped sounded like a serene and knowing silence; in fact, he was trying not to crack up after this latest outburst. _You’re not the boss of me…_ wasn’t there some catalog Arianrod ordered from sometimes, that sold T-shirts and stickers with tongue-in-cheek political and social slogans, and had that same message on one of their shirts? What color did it come in- blue?

       The muffled laughter died in his chest as he recalled the scene at Arianrod’s secondhand mobile home. He suspected that the reason it was sticking in his mind was because the young woman staying with Arianrod, with her eternal awkwardness, reminded him of Orla- was that also what had possessed him to drag the boy down to the dump and throw him into the first boxlike structure he’d found, merciless sunburn or no?

        His mental prattle about the snarky T-shirt- his bandying words with this boy- he was evading the issue. He decided to stop.

        “Now you listen to me, boy.” His voice dropped an octave and became quieter, but he knew his captive could hear him. “As it turns out, yes: I _am_ the boss of you. Firstly, because I am sitting on the lid of the container in which you are shut. But also because I am older, and that means I have more to teach you than Mormonism or how to tie a cravat in the Venetian style, whatever the hell that means. And it also means that while you may be stronger than I am, I’m a damn sight craftier than you, and I know how to fight dirty. So you’ll stay in there until I let you out, and you’ll listen to me good.

       “You never loved that girl. You still don’t. And I’ll prove it.

       “If you loved her, you’d have stayed away. Not because the humans aren’t worthy or because some faux-aristocrats told you to or because of any ridiculous notions of secrecy. This is the Age of Iron, boy, and the humans have no fear to spare for us any longer; there are too many _real_ things to be afraid of. But because it was the sensible thing. You would be well served to learn to recognize things that are sensible- and things that aren’t.

       “Failing that, you would have been _normal_ with her. None of this ‘watching her sleep’ garbage. None of this controlling her and calling it ‘protection.’ None of this isolating her from what friends and family she did have, none of this drama, none of this manipulation of her feelings. If you had loved her, you would not have done any of that.

       “And, of course, if you had truly loved her, we wouldn’t be here now, talking like this.

       “Let me tell you what I think, son. I think you desired her, and you still do. But you convinced yourself it was love, eternal love, because that was the only way you could take her. And because she was alone, and there was a hole in her life for you to sweep in and fill, and her head was too filled with gothic romance to understand that this was not eternal love. It was a cage.

      “It’s hard, isn’t it? On the cusp of manhood, but not a man, never in control of anything, barely in control of yourself. That is hard. I remember. But it is not an excuse.”

        “All of us feel this way…you don’t get it,” said the boy sullenly. “You all think you remember, but you don’t. You _don’t_ remember. You don’t get it. I’m not the only guy who’s…made mistakes like this. Everyone does it, at some point.”

        “No, my boy. Everyone doesn’t.”

        There was a long silence, through which could be heard the faint chirping of the crickets and peepers. Far off, in the darkest part of the forest, there might have been a scream. But up here, that was not unusual. Ranulf took a long sip of Blood Brew, tasting mosquito corpses. They were drawn in by the smell of it, but always the alcohol overcame them, and they drowned. They never learned that the brew can was a death trap.

       The dead mosquitos; this boy and his young, recently Changed wife; the screams in the night. Suddenly this place, this part of Maine, this country, within this universe, seemed to sag under the weight of the sad things that happened here. Funny, that. People associated this world with fear, when really, what it contained the most of was sadness.

        “She’s going to heal. It was just a few bruises.”

        Ranulf didn’t even respond to that; he just let the boy think that excuse and its validity over on his own.

        He didn’t fully understand how Arianrod was able to bring this boy and his basically-a-child-bride here, though she’d once tried to explain it to him. _This world is a story in someone’s head,_ she’d said _. Like the books and movies we watch and read. A waking dream of the imagination._ _It’s not any more objectively real than the story they come_ _from._ Once you realized that, as Ranulf sometimes could understand it, then, if you were a true witch or just very perceptive, you could step out of the dreams and move through them, like the undead janitor up at Arianrod and Owain’s school whom Ranulf had nearly eviscerated that one time he’d caught him leaning down over Orla’s bed. And sometimes, when you came back, if you were a witch you brought other people back with you, if you thought they needed to come.

        These two had.

       “You were wrong, you know,” said the boy quietly, but Ranulf heard him. “I _do_ love her. Even though…this happened. I don’t know why I did this, but I know I love her. I _do_.”

       Ranulf shrugged, though there was probably (in this reality, you could never be sure) no one there to see. He was no psychiatrist; he could be wrong. “Maybe. And maybe she loves you. Even after what you did. Women can be like that, especially human women.” He thought of the dead mosquitos. “As a matter of fact, it’s probable that she loves you.” He took another swig, trying to ignore the bugs. “The problem is…that isn’t going to be enough, my son. At least, not anymore.”


End file.
